GROUNDED Live - 2026: Michael Taylor - Superfine Wool From Super Landscapes

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities. 

In this presentation, Michael Taylor shares how decades of planting trees have transformed both his family's New England landscape and the quality of the wool it produces. Discover how healthy ecosystems and premium superfine wool can go hand in hand, and why investing in landscapes can deliver benefits well beyond the farm gate. 

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:19

And I hope you enjoyed it. But they also managed to get really high quality wool gets sold into the fashion. It's super fine wool from superlandscapes with Michael Taylor.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Next session today here we have Michael Taylor to weave a story on Super Fine Wool from Superlandscapes. I'm very fortunate to have spent a fair bit of time with Michael recently, so I'm really looking forward to hearing him share a bit more about what him and his family are up to on their farm at Taylor's Run near Armadale, New South Wales. Michael's family, sorry, have been planting trees before it was a focus on many farms, or even when some researchers and governments were encouraging people to knock them down, with their farm balancing ecological restoration with top-shelf wool sales into designer brands. Michael is perhaps the only person I know who takes on the fashion walks in Paris, plays an extremely long game, and backs his war with the Italian wool processes, focusing on single origin merino wool that can talk the trunk off to the 200,000 trees he's planted on the farm. And he can also yarn about climate change to our politicians and industry leaders. What I admire most about Michael is his humble, practical approach to his work with an unwavering commitment to his values and ideas, even if this means he has to be patient for the right opportunity. Please welcome Michael.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

This is uh a little bit of a story, a little bit of a discussion. Um, so I'd like to once we get a few more people in here to ask questions, um, or me to ask questions, would be great. Just wanted to talk about our farm. Um at the moment it's incredibly dry, but I feel um when you go out in the morning, the landscape can tell you so much um about what's going on, whether it's where the uh where the sheep have been sleeping, and there's little thawed areas where the where the frost has been the night before, um, where the grasses have been burnt off by the frosts. So we've had three weeks of frosts already. You can see where the wind has been blowing the uh autumn leaves off the trees. Um we're about peak peak autumn colours at the moment. Um you can see uh you can see where the dust is starting to pick up on some of the uh animal tracks um at different times of the day. This is a story about uh why the finest wool and the healthiest landscapes are connected and that why that matters not only for fiber but for food production and sustainability. We were asked to close our eyes this morning um at the introduction and uh asked to think about someone special, and I was thinking about my parents. Um even now it's a little bit hard, but um the work they've done on our farm over the last um 50 years has just been incredible. I've been very lucky to carry that on over the last 25 years. Um but yeah, Josh talked about the long game, it really is uh a long game, but it's actually quite a short game, too. So we've been there nearly 190 years. Um, but that landscape was inhabited for for thousands of years before. So evidence back to 6,000 years, I think, in our in our region. Um so I'm from the land of the Anowan people, uh, people of the high country. Um this was a land um that was limited by temperature, and uh, as I said, frosts from March through to December, some years. Um this time last year, uh we were heading towards um about a foot of snow and the most saturated the country had ever been in my my in living memory. And um, and now we've got a creek that's nearly dry from end to end along the six kilometers of of Creek Bed. So um I posted a video the other day standing in the middle of the creek where the water water would have been over my head um only uh less than less than 10 months ago. So it's a special place. We've been there a long time. Um we're learning the landscape, but uh but we've also modified the landscape a lot too, and that's something that we've been learning to to live with and to accept. So as I said, we came there about 1839, and I don't know whether it was by luck or or um or strategy, but uh we landed in a in a landscape that was ideal for raising sheep. So um my family introduced sheep to that region. It was a beautiful grassy box woodland, um, New England peppermints in all the valleys, in nice open woodland, Tuskegee Poa, um scattered amongst um Bersaria Spinosa, um, blackthorn. And uh they set to uh breeding up uh super fine merinos back in the day. So I'll talk a lot about micron. Um and uh those sheep were about 19 micron, which is probably close to or a little bit broader than the wool that's been used to to make this jacket, um, and a pretty common wool back then. Um the English were keen to get a lot of a lot of that wool back to to England, to their weaving mills up in the Manchester area, up northern Wales. And um, and slowly, slowly over time, Australia became a real powerhouse in um in wool production. Um you've often heard the uh expression Australia rode the sheep's back. Well, um it really did. And up in our area, 45% of the world's superpine marina was being produced back in the in the 50s. So that was 45% of the world consumption of apparel fiber for um uh wool and clothing. So it was quite incredible. And I I never realized that until I started traveling the world and meeting um meeting processors in other countries. I remember um being at the International Wool Conference in Paris uh 15 years ago, and a processor from a very large company, Modiano, um, who one of the largest first stage processors of wool now asked me where I was from. I was actually, I think I was the only wool grower at this conference. And uh they he knew not only the region I was from in Australia, but he knew the farm I was next to in in New England. And um, you know, I was just this little wool grower in in this big event in in the middle of Paris. So it dawned on me how important that was. Um so yeah, as I said, uh back to the family farm. I came back to the family farm 25 years ago, about 25 years ago now. Um I'm sixth generation on the farm. Uh, we are running about 1,850 hectares. Um and depending on the seasons that come and go in the markets, we run between about a thousand and four thousand sheep. So fairly large range. Um have had years up to nearly 5,000 sheep, and during the 2019 drought, down to um just under a thousand, uh, when we've had barely 200 mils. Um whereas over the last five years we've been averaging about 1,100 millimeters of rain a year. So um I didn't I didn't just inherit a business model, I inherited a landscape, a set of questions, and very large shoes to fill, large responsibility, um, which inspires me to keep talking about our story because um what my parents set out to achieve and what has happened on the place and hopefully will continue to happen, um, has been a great learning platform for people all over the country. Um I definitely uh asked a lot of questions when I came home in 2004. Um my father said I was like an alien. I'd been in Melbourne for 10 years, so you know, probably had a Victorian accent and been sipping cappuccinos and um lots of teasing about me being uh being a barista, and um um we started having a family, so I'd been doing the babicinos for my kids around the cafes in Melbourne, and um um I uh the connection with Italy and and coffee was interesting because uh just after we got married, we were over there and uh because I was the barista, I was uh tasked with ordering the coffee and they um and I ordered a caffeine and uh thought I knew what I was saying in Italian, but uh yeah, they gave me a little espresso and a glass of hot milk, and uh yeah, they laughed about that. Oh, you can't order a latte. Uh anyway, um about 10 years later I was in Melbourne and I ordered a latte uh in English, um, put on my best Victorian accent, and uh yeah, they brought out an espresso, glass of hot water, and a glass of hot milk. It was the um deconstructed coffee. So I realized I was actually just about 10 years ahead of my time. So I asked lots of questions um coming from having had nearly 10 years in the city, and I asked, you know, why why sheep? Why why do we shear then? Why do we why do we graze like this? Why are we planting so many trees? Um, I probably already knew that reason, but still, um, you know, there was just so why do we do things at this time of the year? And um, I think about four or five years in, I finally settled into a realization that what we had been doing was fitting pretty well with the seasons and fitting pretty well with the landscape. Um we uh we were graziers came into that area, as I said, because it was a beautiful open, grassy box woodland, um, really diverse native pastures, um, and it turned out that produced incredibly beautiful white wool. Um, and the other thing was that we had a relatively even plane of nutrition through throughout the year, and that meant we were able to grow very strong fibers as well. Uh, every time you you have a change in diet or a change in season, if you have a really hot spell or a wet wet period, um, and then and the pasture composition changes rapidly, you actually get uh a weak a weak spot in the wool. So we uh despite the relatively extreme seasons, um the plane of nutrition remains relatively stable. And especially if you look after your native pastures that have evolved over thousands of years um in that climate and been supporting the kangaroo and wallaby population um on our farm? I'm gonna talk a little bit more about wool, but before I do, um I've got a question. Nearly enough people here now. I'd like to know, uh compared to I've given you a little bit of a hint before, but compared to Ultrafine Marino, can anybody guess uh or tell me what the human hair, what the micron of human hair is, roughly? We got 30 over here. Anyone else? What's the micron? What's the diameter, fiber diameter of human hair? Yeah, that's right. You can reach out, touch your neighbor's hair, that's fine. 40 here. Where do we stop? We'll go with 50. It's actually about between it's between 50 and 100. So around 60 60 microns. So that's a thousandth, uh, one micron is a thousandth of a of a millimeter. Um right, no, yes, but yeah, and uh ultra fine merino is sub 15.5 micron. Um, we are actually growing wool now down to nine microns. The lowest fiber diameter micron bale of wool was 10.2 microns um grown last year. It was well, there was a prize awarded by Zenia, who is a very prestigious um Italian brand processor, and uh they awarded um a prize for uh a whole bale. So one bale is is over 100 kilos, between 100 and 200 kilos of wool, a whole bale of paddock grown um ultrapine merino. So to give you an idea, cashmere, which everyone um believes to be incredibly soft, and it is, is around that 1516 micron. So um Ultra Pine Merino is being grown a lot finer than even cashmere. So who gave me 1550? Is that you? This is a little uh little sample wool pack, enough for about a beanie of some 15 micron wool from our our farm. So Ultra Pine Merino actually makes up only five percent of uh total wool production around the world. And in terms of uh apparel wool, about um so less than uh less than six, I think it's about fifty-five percent at the moment of um of the world uh wool uh I'm looking at pill here. I was talking about trying to regurgitate uh um figures. Sixty percent of the world's apparel wool is um grown in Australia, and ninety-five percent of the world's super fine merino is grown um in Australia, and less than uh five percent of that is ultra fine merino. So you can see that where that puts uh puts ultrafine merino in terms of a percentage of the world world will supply as a fiber, and less than point not one percent of that is sub-14 micron. So um it starts to become an incredibly precious uh fiber, but there's about 60 60 tons of ultra fine, so sub-15, five, sub-14, sorry, so extra, extra fine. You go ultra fine, extra fine, um grown in the world. And vacunia, which is often spouted as being one of the the most precious fibers, um, and it comes in at around 1213, 13, 14 micron. Um, there's only a couple of tons of that grown in the world, and it is essentially wild harvested um of the vacunia, which are a camelid in um in the Patagonia, in the the Pyrene the uh Patagonian mountains and um sorry, the uh the mountains of northern Chile and um Argentina, and uh they have to herd the animals in and and um um but they have to put a bag over the head to get calm them down, but they pluck the fiber and it's uh they sit they do it only uh once every couple of years, so it's a very, very rare fiber to to harvest. And cashmere isn't the the amount of fine cashmere isn't actually a whole lot more, but um but now we're growing uh ultrapine merino um on sheep that uh might look like any other merinos, um, but now we have the technology to to test those and identify those animals, which leads me to the fact that I realized about six or seven years ago that all this talk about merino, and I'm actually a larger food producer, so off our place we're producing 10 to 15 tons of wool a year, and um I actually produce 60 to 70,000 tons of meat a year. Um it's crazy. I didn't actually realize this until I started um getting more involved in uh climate change activity, and that takes me back to my agroforestry story. How am I going? Are you keeping up? Um as I said, we've planted over a quarter of a million trees on our farm over the last 45, 50 years. Um my parents started planting trees back in the early 80s. Uh my grandfather had already started planting trees back in the 70s when we realized we needed more shelter for our livestock. So, again, the history of the New England was that uh it was a grassy box woodland, a lot of open country, but then a lot of the ridges were covered in in denser forest. And over the years, graziers started to clear some of those, um, not only for as a resource, but um to try and open up some more of that country for pasture to grow more sheep. Um, but it wasn't until the 50s, 60s um that synthetic fertilizers became available, and uh farmers up in the area realized they could start to spread these fertilizers and run nearly double the number of stock on the landscape. Um we know very well now where that led to. Um between the 50s and the mid 70s, 80s, um, New England went from about 25, 30 percent tree cover to less than 5% tree cover through clearing and then overgrazing. Overgrazing meaning that um a lot of the lignituba seedlings that were normally coming up weren't. Getting above grazing height. And then over time, as the seed bank depleted, uh gradually there was no regeneration at all. Other things got broken in the ecosystem. And uh one of those was the loss of the basaria spinosa, so the black thorn. I don't know whether any of you are familiar, but there's a parasitic wasp that lives uh that relies on the basaria spinosa out of season. Um and that parasitic wasp lays its eggs in the scarab beetle grubs, and that was one of the natural controls. But for graziers at the time, the basar spinoza was just this prickly little bush that got in the way of their grazing operations. So a lot of that was lost out of the landscape and uh and the the natural control for the for the beetles. So we've just gone through another period of uh five wet years, followed by a very hot, dry summer, um, and we've seen a massive loss of eucalypts again um through uh uh attack by the uh or over-grazing by the scarab beetles, so an overpopulation. Um we're gradually being bringing those back. We've managed to claw back uh the canopy cover on our farm to nearly 23 percent. And we're working again towards about 30 percent um across our farm. And it was really exciting this summer and even in the last couple of weeks to see um how many of those shiny black wasps were buzzing around at ground level, obviously looking for somewhere to lay their eggs. So um, and we are now getting after planting a quarter of a million trees on our place, um, and 30, 40 years down the track, we're starting to see regeneration again, natural regeneration on the farm. Um, it's taken a while, but my parents wander around the farm now with their jaws dragging on the ground, they can't believe that all these tiny little trees that they planted are so huge. So agroforestry started out initially as a just a practical shade and shelter for our animals. Um, but over the last uh twenty years, so maybe a little bit longer, because we were actually harvesting uh thinnings from some of our pine plantations um as peeled round posts, so for fencing. Uh, we needed more fence posts to put in more fences to be able to plant more trees. Uh we've changed our grazing management over that time. Initially, again, not out of specifically knowing what we were doing, but we were gradually closing up areas and starting to observe uh different grazing patterns. And now we generally are matching our planted areas with new paddocks that we're creating. So, and thankfully, we're not planting any more trees along fence lines. Uh, the foot of snow we had last year was unprecedented in again in living memory, and we had trees and branches coming down a lot of across a lot of fences. Um the challenges. Uh lots of things, like I said, that we can point out that you don't want to do as many successes as that we've had, we've had a lot of losses as well on the farm. We uh we did a major logging operation uh about five years ago four years ago. Um and we took out, it wasn't a big area, it was about four hectares in total, um, but it was the first time we'd done a big logging operation. We were taking out logs up to about six, seven hundred centimeters in um six hundred seventy seven hundred millimeters in diameter. Um and we learned a whole lot more. We learned things like the sawmills can't take much over 600 mil in diameter. Um, yet on our small portable mill, like the one Rowan has, we can mill up to a couple of meters in diameter if we had to. So um we learned little things like that. I think um uh yeah, we'd we a lot of our logs were taken out without us knowing how much was going out. Um, I presume some of you caught Rowan's Rowan's uh presentation, Rowan Reid's presentation this morning, um and uh talking about uh the value of timber. Um there's a lot of a lack of transparency in the timber supply chain, and we were sending we had no idea how many logs we were sending out, we had no idea what volume, and we didn't actually know what price we were gonna get for about uh seven or eight weeks after those logs had left the farm. Um, and then we realized that uh a lot of those logs were being downgraded for pulp pulp as pulp grade logs, and we were gonna be nearly paying for the removal of them. So I think in the in the end we were getting about 50 cents a ton. Um and we realized those same logs, I could take one of those pulp grade logs and put it through our own sawmill, and it was about a 26,000 percent uh value add to take it from a piece of a log that was worth worth less than 12 cents to to something that was worth about 26, 26 dollars just by turning it into a square piece of timber. So we were able to highlight a lot of the the um challenges in the supply chain there. But moving forwards, um more recently we've we've been involved in a lot of natural capital accounting research. And uh finally we have some more tangible uh explanations, I guess, for the advantages of the uh trees on our farm. Initially, as I said, they were purely for shade and shelter, and we were looking for those unsheltered ridgelines and and frosty valleys that we wanted to provide more shelter in. Um, but now we've been able to show um through the natural capital accounting that uh we're sequestering a huge amount of carbon on our farm, and we're also increasing the the production of our pastures in some of those well-designed, wide-spaced areas where we're achieving close to 30% tree cover. Um and that's led us to being able to take that information and uh and market our wool in a way that we never thought we would be able to. So I think every wool grower's dream is to to see their own wool turned into clothing that they can wear. Are we going for time, Josh? But uh I think about 20, it was yeah, back in the mid-90s. Um uh there was a real slump, yeah, one of the many slumps in the wool market. Um, but uh we banded together with my cousins, who was five Taylor family properties, banned it together and uh negotiated a direct selling contract with a processor in Italy. Um it was the first time my parents said that they were ever able to budget um on their wool operation. Um I've had uh you know years where we've sold about a third of the amount of production we have now for more than double uh the value. So that the wool market I I believe uh is one of the most erratic out of all the commodity markets. Uh and uh but we've found ways to to even out some of those bumps. And uh as I said, we're also large meat producers, so we've we run fat lambs and we run cattle on and off as well. Um, and we've obviously added timber to the list of uh enterprises we can move between. But the direct selling contract uh was a real breakthrough for us. Um we managed to keep a three-year rolling contract going for about seven years, um, which was unheard of back at that time. I think the Taylor families were the first to manage to negotiate a contract like that. Um and since then there have been we've seen lots of contracts coming out of processes over time as they've started to see uh the stress on supply for them. It's very easy for a for a wool farmer to flip to to purely meat production or um or get rid of the rid of the cheap altogether. Um I'd go the other other way. But uh but for a processor in Italy who has had a factory there for a couple hundred years specializing in in wool processing, it's very hard to flip flip their business. So uh processors have started to offer more contracts, and uh as the shift away from um and the recognition of the issues around synthetic fibers, we've started to see more and more designers questioning where their fiber comes from. So that was about about 25 years ago. Um, and since then we've gradually pieced more and more bits of the puzzle together in the supply chain. And then two years ago, uh got to a point that we had enough contacts in the supply chain and we felt that there was enough demand. Um, we'd made enough connections through designers that we decided to bite the bullet and send our own batch of wool over to Italy. It's not the first time it's been done. Um I'm again wearing an MJ Bale uh uh jacket here. Simon Cameron did that. Uh the Kingston range of wool through MJ Bale is a single origin wool. Um the difference is we still own our wool that is has gone over to Italy and has been processed. Um it's currently the only only single origin batch of ultrapine merino in the world that is still owned by the grower. Um I won't say what I'm doing is easy. It's taken, like I said, over 25 years of piecing together all the parts of the supply chain. Um you'll get to see me sit together with Tom Dennis tomorrow and talk about um how that's worked as well for them. Um the supply chain is very long. It can be sometimes up to four or five years before the wool that is harvested from a farm actually gets turned into a garment. So we're hoping eventually just to speed that up. But at the moment we have no um, or basically no first stage processing in Australia. There's a little bit in uh over in South Australia, E.P. Robertson, who used to be down here in in uh in Melbourne, um we're doing some first stage processing as well. That's the scouring, the washing of the fiber. Um, but that was uh less than less than maybe 0.5% of Australia's wool clip. So hell of a lot of wool to shift. To give you an idea, one uh small merino off of our farm produces about three three and a half kilos of of wool. That is enough for nearly two four or five thousand dollar Italian suits um off every sheep, so or enough for I don't know, three two or three jumpers. So it's it's uh it's pretty incredible. As small as our farm is in the scheme of things, we're producing a huge amount of fiber for the world. And um it's crazy to think uh you look at production graphs uh of how much more fiber is being consumed um in fashion. And I'm sure everybody's heard dipits here and there about the fast fast issues around fast fashion and microplastics getting into our food systems. Um but over the last few hundred years, the average wool production has remained relatively stable. Um demand for fiber has risen, and uh you know, cotton has filled some of that gap, and silk and cashmere and all those others, but generally uh the biggest gap has been pushed by and filled by synthetic fabrics, and um, and we're now seeing all the issues around that. Over the last, it's only been the last couple of years, and this is the first time I've really tried to make those linkages between uh natural fibers and and uh and food. Um but I was as John Josh mentioned, dancing in Bilem at the climate conference last year. Um Josh is amazing on the dance. Look, all I can say is as long as you're wearing wool, you won't stink as much as we we'd um look, I'm gonna I'm gonna call a break there and ask another question. Um what uh what farm produce has more protein than any edible food at this uh festival? Anyone? Because protein is really popular at the moment, you know, you go into the supermarkets and everything's like this has got protein on it, whatever. Anybody anybody got any ideas? You were just before, yes, it is wool, and I'll give you another interesting fact. Wool is actually uh a stronger fiber than even the strongest uh timber fibers in uh intensile strength. So a lot of uh timber fibers are up to about 60 MPA. Um wool fibers are up to about 160 intensile strength, so grown in a you know, even planned and nutrition. So I'm gonna give you this cheese board. This is uh very special. This is about 65 years of growth just in this cheese board. It was from a hundred and uh 185-year-old elm tree that my ancestors planted. Um, and it felt one of them fell down recently. So we actually have an avenue of these elms. Um, but yeah, uh when you want to find out about what quarter sawn means, go and see uh Rowan Reed later at his sawmill. Uh but this is a piece of Quartasorn elm from our farm, and that's 65 years just in that piece. Don't mind the smell, that is a tongue oil and citrus oil is very safe for your cheese. Um so yeah, look, I'd I'd like to call for some questions now, if anybody's got some questions, because um I do I do I could I've got some yes, Courtney. I'll take it up.

SPEAKER_04 38:28

Thank you, Michael. Um do you see a future for local wool processing in Australia? Like you said, that there's a the processor in South Australia. Is like everything just happening overseas, or do you see potential in Australia for a local wool industry?

SPEAKER_03 38:46

I hope so. Um we've had a we've had some ups and downs with our representative body. Um but we hope that things are going to change and there might be some more recognition for uh all the different types of of uh of wool. Um you know when you buy timber, you buy you buy hard wood for flooring, you might buy soft wood for for framing, or you'll buy uh decorative wood for for furniture. Um unfortunately a lot of our wool has been marketed as as wool. Um and uh uh pointed out how rare and precious sub-14 micron wool is compared to wool that is you know 30 plus micron from meat breeds of sheep. Um, in France, that wool is actually classed as waste. Uh this is a question that's being asked right around the world. France is they've also they've even been in Europe, they've lost all of their wool processing capabilities, um, very similar to Australia. But to use that wool, which is a natural fiber, um full of nutrition, um, by the way, wool is 95% to 98% protein. What meat's around 25-30%. So I there is research about using wool in food, but uh, but that wool uh wool has to travel to Germany from France to be washed before it can come back as mulch for uh for for vineyards or for plants. Um there's it's a pretty crazy world we live in like that. So I I there's a hope that yes, there'll be more processing come back into Australia. I had a very inspiring visit to Loomtech's in Melbourne, actually just yesterday morning. There are weaving mill and dye house. Um, so they're doing yarn dyeing, uh load of the tops dyeing. So wool goes from being the raw fiber in a 20 kilo bale. Sorry, to 200 kilo, up to 200 kilo bale of wool goes into most of the scouring mills around the world work on about a bale batch of wool. Um the reason being it takes time for the chemistry to settle through that uh scouring process, the wool being washed. So the bigger the batch, the easier it is to to um to get that that system up to wool scoured in about 60 degree water. So they have to monitor the the temperature and the water and the pH. Um and especially with the more delicate ultrafine fibers. The wool is then combed and carded. Um so all the fibers are aligned and the seed and everything is taken out. Um once the wool is combed and carded, it is wound into what's called bumps, bumps or bobbins, bumps of wool, which are about 50 kilos. So you go from 200 kilos to 10 tons and back to 50 kilos. Um, often those slivers are about 25 grams per meter. Um and then depending on what sort of yarn you want, where you whether you're after a bulky woolen yarn for a jumper or ultra fine yarn for for a woven fabric, um you can go many different ways. So that that those fibers that are aligned in tops in a bump are then taken and turned into rovings, so smaller pieces, and then spun into a fiber. And then you're obviously you get your two-ply and your four ply, etc. yarns. At the moment, uh the first stage processing stops at uh at scouring in Australia. Um it's not completely true. There is a little bit of combing and carding um for some of the broader wools. So there is a few brands, and again, Tom Dennis, who I'll be sitting on a panel with tomorrow, they're getting um their wool processed here in Australia. Kashmir Connections do have some of that machinery. The weaving and dye house, um, they have also inherited some of the old machinery that came out of CSRO and Geelong, Geelong Textiles. Um, that was mainly for research. So they're very small setups. But as I said yesterday, it was very inspiring. Um, only a few months ago, Australian manufacturing strategy was announced, and part of that was um involving getting more textile production back into Australia and Loom Tech. In Geelong, they've been buying new machines, they've been getting rid of some load of the old technology. Um, and it was a real buzz to go into their focusing at the moment on furnishings, so coverings for for chairs and couches and interiors of cars and things like that. Um, so they're fairly coarse fabrics. Um, but their eyes lit up when I pulled out my fabric samples that I brought back from Italy. So, and one of the technicians there had been working on um on textiles like that. When we were in uh I've been traveling around the world quite a bit the last couple of years uh as part of a Nuffield scholarship. My topic was actually on agroforestry, but I squeezed in a little bit of um wool-related stuff everywhere I went, and I was uh visited the um one of the big wool growing areas in Argentina, and we visited a lot of the factories there and and the and the executives that were showing us around were showing us all the the technology and the all the things they were doing and where the wool was coming from, etc. And and the other girl I was traveling with and I were actually looking at the people that we might import into Australia to to run some of that machinery in the future, because there's a huge amount of knowledge required. Um and that's why the the Italians at the moment, uh, their biggest worry is that they won't have the knowledge to um you know produce these fabrics and products going forwards, um, as a lot of their older technicians are retiring and leaving. So um so keeping hanging on to those skills and bringing them back into the country is really important um going forwards. But yes, there's a hope that going forwards there will be more. Um for my type of wool, a lot of it, you know, the market in Australia is 0.01% or less. Um it's going into fairly high-end products. But there's a hell of a lot of wool in Australia that can go into all our other clothing. Um, so it'll be great, you know, to be supporting Tom tomorrow. Um, I know that it's been a bit of a trend. Who's a knitter in the crowd here? Yeah, we need a few more. But uh, I know knitting's made a bit of a comeback. So um uh and that's sparking interest. Uh I need I think we all need to be asking more about where our textiles come from. It's hard though when you know that uh the average micron yarn will potentially have fibers from 120 plus farms. Um so it's very hard when you you're asking for traceability. And even RWS responsible wool standard wool or even ZQ wool, um, the New Zealand Merino standard, uh, there lots of traceability claims. Um and they potentially do have trace back to where those where that wool came from, but often they can't provide it um because of privacy situations or just the length of that supply chain. So I know designers are coming back to processors, you know, two or three years after uh they've got products on the shelf, and factories just can't handle um sorting out that sort of you know trace back uh to individual batches. Um so you know, 15 years ago when I talked about traceability, the the processors just laughed at me because um because that they were like, yeah, we we know where it all comes from, we we can trace it back to the farms, and like I said, you know, that processor knew where my farm was pretty much um because he'd been seeing our wool go through the system, but um, but yeah, to actually do that in reality is is a lot more complicated. Um so I think as we as consumers ask more, um there will be pressure on suppliers and and and then processes and industry to to continually improve those systems. Um there's little hiccups like we've just been forced to use wool bales, wool packs now to pack our wool in, so very similar to that tiny little wool pack over there, but 200 kilos, um, that have EID tags on them. Um, and everybody's like, that's great, we'll be able to trace our wool. Um but turns out there's uh incompatibilities with the system, and uh we've been told that even in the where big elders brands back in your elders warehouse in Sydney, in Melbourne here, they're putting their own EID tags on them to be able to make that work. So there's lots of little things, but the more that consumers ask where the fibers are coming from, it's going to put the pressure on. Um and there's lots of us that are trying to come up the supply chain to meet you. Sorry, one one up the back.

SPEAKER_02 49:24

I'll ask you a question as well in the meantime, mate.

SPEAKER_03 49:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

Can can you what I think you haven't done is talk about the the massive risk that you took about taking your ball to Italy and the connection of story back to local, like the processes there and what the next steps are. You just want to talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 49:42

Yeah, sometimes I I I forget about the risk because we've been planting trees for so many years and maybe just being a farmer, you know, risk is um, you know, when you buy when you buy a sheep for $150 and a year and a half later they're worth $2. And um yeah, so I did actually uh I did actually take a big risk a couple of years ago, but um we figured at the time it was better to pay interest on on something positive going forwards, something that we dreamed about to take the wool through the supply chain um than to lose control of it. So yeah, there's there's quite a bit of money sitting there in our wool in Italy. Um But I can't talk to I can't talk to designers if I can't actually have something to offer them and the potential there. It's the same way that if we sold our logs, um if we only sold logs of timber, um, you know, to have our own sawmill and have our own timber to be able to talk to to the full story um to be able to pull out a bit of timber. We had a had a carpenter working on our farm recently and he he was loving it. He needed a bit of timber to just wander up to the sawmill and and gr and grab it. But um sorry, Josh. Again. Um look, I think it's the the risk is is uh it has been well worth it. As I said, you know, planting trees. It was a big risk for my parents planting so many trees, but now those benefits are um are are really becoming apparent. Um, and I'm hoping that taking the risk to um take our wool through to um to nearly to a product, um and being able to educate designers that often don't even buy their own yarn. Um they may buy a fabric that is in a nice color, or they might be, you know, they may get it, you know, they may go as go go back as far as dyeing, but uh even finding designers that understand what the yarn is that is in their fabric is quite challenging. So but there's a lot of stories out there, and and um, like I said, the issues around microplastics and um and carbon in our atmosphere, uh it's it's been very powerful. Uh yeah, and we're gradually we're learning. A lot of us are learning here. So this is this is uh me as much getting you to fact check me as telling you a whole bunch of facts. So um, sorry, question.

SPEAKER_05 52:37

Talk of can you just talk a bit about how you graze to maintain that that beautiful plane of nutrition throughout the season? What are the things that you do to make sure that you don't get those weak spots in the staples?

SPEAKER_03 52:53

It it pretty much I guess when it started out um with my ancestors, it would have been about um you know being uh being the shepherd, and and shepherding is a is a is a is a true art. Uh there's a lot of science in what they do too, but they are the ultimate observers of of livestock. And um I have a friend in France who is a professional shepherd. He sits with the sheep all day, every day during the grazing season up in the Alps in France. Um things are a little bit different in Australia with with uh the scale has and uh you know our claims about the cost of labour and everything has forced us into doing things differently. But I would say it's essentially managing your managing your stocking rates and how much pressure you're putting on the pastures. Then how you go about managing the grazing patterns um really probably depends a bit on your context. Uh with it where uh we're definitely rotationally grazing, but I think if you're looking at, you know, essentially your the pastures you're growing are that's your bread and butter. So if you're watching how those pastures are growing, what is going to seed, what is not going to seed, at what stage you're keeping the plants in, the effect it's having on the soil, whether you're bearing the soil, um, whether those pastures need shelter or not. Um we've uh, as I said, we've started planting trees, and just through doing that, that's forced us to see changes in the way the animals graze on closing up areas. We've seen different plants come back, um crash grazing those areas to get a little bit of production out of them during establishment. Traveling around the world looking at how they do agroforestry. I think probably one of the, if I've got time, one of the short quick stories about um northern Argentina, there was a property, a large landholder there. They were essentially foresters growing pines, they had large sawmills. Um, then the uh early 2000s, the uh their economy crashed in Argentina, and they actually had a food crisis, they couldn't feed there. Uh people weren't able to afford food. Um the timber market collapsed, so they actually introduced cattle into their plantations, and then um over time they realized that uh by thinning their plantations to a point where they could have pasture, um, and they were also getting 20% more production out of their cattle that were running in those forests, but they've thinned their forests only to a point, uh, and Rowan Reed's written a lot about growing you know fat fat trees fast, um, they actually slowed down the growth of their pines. They could grow a fully grow, fully harvestable product at 20 20 years less, and uh they actually pushed their harvest period out to 40 years. Because their background was forestry, they recognized that by growing a sl a slower growing pine, they were getting a structural grade wood, and they were getting a lot more value for that. But you tell most farmers, sorry, you're gonna have to wait another 20 years. Um but as I said, by introducing cattle into their forests, they had a another form of income, and they were actually able to feed their staff to keep them going. So, yeah. We we graze all of our all of our forest areas. A lot of people might look at the forest areas and say, oh, that's just forest, but actually we graze all our forest areas. Sorry, question.

SPEAKER_06 56:56

Michael, it's a wonderful presentation. And I've so appreciated how you've been weaving the history, your own family history through the presentation, you know, going back six generations, and obviously your own connection and attachment to the country that lured you back from Melbourne. So, how important is that story? And do you get a chance to tell that story in the marketing of your wool?

SPEAKER_03 57:24

I do.

SPEAKER_06 57:26

And are people receptive to that? Do you feel like that's a really important part of what you're doing?

SPEAKER_03 57:32

It is. I'm I'm I'm learning how to tell it better. Um it's important, but at the same time recognizing that we have to be offering something that is is uh is is really bringing more value to them. It's it's all well and good to tell stories, but if you're not bringing solutions to what they're doing as well, um it's just another story. So I think yeah, loads of stories here, but but look for look for the amazing solutions as well. Um and as I said, you know, that our our farm has become like a I have done a presentation on uh Lab 101, you know, wearing a lab lab coat because our farm is like a big a big experiment. Um unfortunately, some of these things, there's no forestry in our area. So the only way we've been able to learn about how to do forestry in in our area is to do it ourselves. So there is forestry in other areas. Rowan gets it really easily because there's a lot of forest industry in this area. So sorry, I shouldn't say he gets it easy in his work incredibly hard, but but uh but when you you you're not when you're doing something really different, it's it's you know, even bringing sheep into the area originally would have been trying to imagine what it was like for my ancestors. They would have been up against all sorts of different things that they had no idea about. One last question before I get kicked off.

SPEAKER_00 59:12

Can I ask a question? Yes, you can ask a question. Just on traceability and your carbon sequestration sort of machine with all your trees, do your buyers ask you and can you supply them with information on carbon neutrality of your fibre? And are they interested? Because it strikes me with all the sort of petrochemical derived fibers, there's a massive opportunity to be selling carbon neutral fiber. But I don't know if there's demand or an understanding. Could you just comment on that?

SPEAKER_03 59:42

Well, there yes, yes, I can. I can provide the data now. Um the first carbon studied on our on our farm was in 1992 before the internet. Um before anybody thought it would ever become a commodity. But uh, and that was in our pine plantations too, which is funny. But um, yeah, no, we do, we have had carbon accounts done and done and done. Um and they're always evolving too, because as scientists start to realize there's all these other leakages. Um buyers do care, um, but trying to figure out how to make it for work for the business is the part that's been challenging. And um, but there is actually a current uh a Walmart uh project right now, which has managed to get a bunch of brands on board um to pay money for for nature positive and and carbon sequestration. So that will be an insetting project. So um there's some properties will probably still generate accu's for that too. But yeah, there's there's been a shift just in the last couple of years, probably away from carbon only, as again, as they've realized that it's not it's uh it's nature. So um so for us that's uh that's really easy story to tell. Um, but yes, I have all the carbon accounting, I have all the natural capital accounting, so I have all the metrics, and these are not new metrics, they're canopy cover, they're ground cover, ecosystem health, soil health, so things that have been around forever. Um one last timber question. Which is waterproof? A red oak or a white oak. Sorry, Ren, this time you have to stand up. Red or white? Oh you missed out just before too, so sorry, Joe. So I I'm just giving her some red oak uh seed. There no, there's some um, but this is a Mexican loquat leaf oak, um, and it's fairly rare in Australia. Uh the leaves look, there's a leaf in there you can have a look at. They look like loquat. But um that's been collected by my parents in Mexico about uh 30 years ago. And when there and it's now seeding on our farm.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:25

So all right. Can you please give the loudest applause to Michael Taylor?